


Rock Yourself a Little Harder

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Bechdel Test Pass, Bisexual Female Character, Episode: s02e02 Everybody Loves a Clown, Episode: s05e16 Dark Side of the Moon, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Female Friendship, Gen, Heaven, Mothers and Daughters, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, The Roadhouse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 08:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2382083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don’t get a lot of young women coming through the Roadhouse. Not ones looking like her, leastways. Rode hard and put up wet, yes sir, and Ellen slides a double measure of the good stuff across the bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rock Yourself a Little Harder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Evandar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/gifts).



> Regarding Jesse of Pamela’s “Jesse Forever” tattoo: The curiously ambiguous exchange from Lazarus Rising (“Who’s Jesse?” / “Well, **IT** wasn’t forever”) always caught my ear, and although Jesse is traditionally a masculine spelling I have met several girls whose names were spelled that way. So I hope I won’t be asking too much suspension of disbelief when I tell you that I’ve cast Pamela’s Jesse as a woman.

“You okay, sweetheart?”

 

They don’t get a lot of young women coming through the Roadhouse. Not ones looking like her, leastways. Rode hard and put up wet, yes sir, and Ellen slides a double measure of the good stuff across the bar.

 

She doesn’t look up ’til the glass bumps into her hand and Bill would be giving her a hard time about it if he saw, he loves to grumble about Ellen and her lost causes, how she lets her strays drink them out of house and home. But Ellen does the books around here, not Bill, and seeing as he’s currently over at the pool table losing last night’s tips to that idiot John, Ellen figures he can keep his opinions to himself.

 

The young woman looks up and Ellen blinks. She’s little more than a girl. Would be, anyway, if her eyes didn’t belong to a face much older than the one she’s wearing. _She’s a beauty_ , Ellen thinks, and then, _She’s been through hell._

 

“It’s on the house.” Ellen nods at the whiskey when the girl doesn’t take it. “You are old enough, right? Ain’t gonna get me in trouble?”

 

The ghost of a smile passes over the girl’s face and she lifts the glass, considers it for a moment, then downs it in one. She hisses through her teeth and shakes her head. “God _damn_ , lady, I couldn’t pay you for that if you told me to. Wow, that’s good stuff, what exactly do you take me for?”

 

Ellen smiles and pours out two more. They toast and drink and Ellen leans on her elbows across the bar. “I take you for someone in need of a friend. What brings you in here all alone, honey?”

 

The girl winces and looks away, then sets her jaw and meets Ellen’s eyes. “My girlfriend is dead,” she says, her voice as flat and empty as her eyes are alive and fierce, as though daring Ellen to say something. Ellen wouldn’t have dared, even if she’d been inclined. “Something killed my Jesse, and I want to know what. And I want to make it pay. I was told there might be someone here who could help with that.”

 

Ellen nods once and covers the girl’s hand with her own. “My name’s Ellen, sweetheart. Ellen Harvelle. And you heard right. You’ve come to the right place.”

 

Two weeks later, Pammy lights the match over the open grave, and watches the spirit that killed her girlfriend go up in smoke. Ellen keeps watch from the road and feels her breath catch to see Bill rest his hand on the girl’s shoulder, offering silent comfort as she grieves for her Jesse. Ellen blinks quickly and tries to blame the smoke, but that night back in their bed above the bar, she rests her head on Bill’s chest and he holds her tight. Every beat of his heart reminds her that he is alive, same as she knows it reminds him that the rest of his family ain't.

 

 

***

 

 

Pamela never gets too far from Nebraska after that.

 

She spends some time in Iowa, keeps going as far as St. Louis before she turns around, heads north again. She thinks about going back east but ends up in Chicago for awhile. Chicago’s good to her; it’s nothing like home. People here laugh at psychics, mostly, don’t seek them out. Keep themselves to themselves, too, and nevermind their neighbors. She thinks she and Jesse should have come to a city like this when they ran away. Somewhere she wouldn’t have been tempted to get back into all that stuff she swore to leave behind when she was eighteen -- young and stupid and in love, and sick to death of her mom and grandma and the family legacy; done with the visions that came on so strong that mom and gram thought she was lying when she was a kid; done with hearing voices whisper to her even before she’d lit the candles or crushed the herbs or said the words. She wasn’t going to live her life like the third Weird Sister in their already weird house. Who lived with their mom and grandma forever, anyway, these days? It wasn’t the dark ages. Just because Pammy’s mother was a psychic like her mother before her, that didn’t mean anything anymore.

 

She buys a motorbike as soon as she can afford one and she rides it every weekend, out of the city and wherever the wind takes her. She introduces herself as Pamela, now, and makes friends with kids like herself. Her days she spends with people who don’t talk about “back home” or “before,” and her nights with girls or boys or both; seeks out strong hands and soft lips and laughing eyes and that first summer she goes on the road with a band that can’t decide on a name or stay sober long enough to get through a show and for awhile life feels like one long party.

 

The first time a guy asks “Who’s Jesse?” as she’s pulling her shirt back on and she has to think for a second before she understands the question, she takes her bike out and doesn’t come back for two days. After that, she starts making up stories about who this mysterious _Jesse_ was, the crazier the better, and she imagines Jesse laughing with her, egging her on. She can remember her better when she pictures her wild and happy.

 

But still, _That stupid tattoo_ , she thinks. They bankrupted themselves on those, right after they ran off. She doesn’t even have a photo of her, just that ink. If they hadn’t done that, if they hadn’t started out their life together as a couple of dumb kids lacking even two pennies to rub together, maybe she wouldn’t have been tempted. Maybe she would have tried harder to find another way, worked two restaurants and the bar, hell she should have worked street corners before turning back to that.

 

But she'd been hungry, and broke, and she wanted the new Skynyrd album. And that poor woman had only wanted to talk to her daughter one last time and Pamela thought, _why not_? Why not put next month’s rent in her pocket while helping a mom say goodbye to her murdered child? Jesse had gone with her, wanting to see what a real _séance_ looked like, and the ghost had killed her.

 

Jesse’s been dead longer than Pamela even knew her when the phone rings one summer afternoon.

 

“Pammy? It, it’s Ellen.”

 

She’s got her mouth open to say _Yeah, Ellen, I know, you’re the only one’s still calling me Pammy, like I’m a schoolgirl,_ when she hears the sound of a muffled sob, like Ellen had put her hand over the mouthpiece.

 

“It’s Bill, Pammy. He—he’s—Can you come? We—we need you.”

 

***

 

Pamela has never been so terrified in her life.

 

It’s ten, a hundred times worse than the night Jesse died. She hadn’t known what was happening then, couldn’t have predicted it. But she’s walking into this with her eyes wide open, fully aware of what happened the last time she contacted the victim of a violent death. But Ellen needs her, and she owes Ellen a debt she never thought she’d be able to repay.

 

“And I’m not just talking about the whiskey, back when I was dead broke,” she says, trying to smile at Ellen, feeling it wobble and slip sideways as Ellen squeezes her hand, their palms slick with cold sweat.

 

Little Joanna is there, old man Singer, too, standing watch over them with one of his ancient musty books. He’d tried to take care of the situation, it seemed, when Bill first started haunting them, but old Bill was too strong for him.

 

“Let’s begin,” Pamela says softly, willing her voice to stay steady, letting out a long, slow breath. They join hands around the table.

 

Two hours later, with tears on their cheeks, Ellen and Joanna say goodbye to Bill and he vanishes into the ether. Pamela feels his spirit dissipate and vanish, the tension in her chest along with him. She doesn’t know what happens to spirits after they let go and journey on, but she believes it has to be something better than _that_. Better than what she’d felt slam into her when she made contact with Bill. A howling wind, he’d felt like, or a tidal wave. An angry, destructive force that couldn’t move past the violence that had taken him from the realm of the living.

 

In life, Bill had been one of the kindest, gentlest men Pamela had ever met. He was a tough old son of a bitch, yeah, and he hunted monsters like some men hunted turkeys. But the way he’d helped her track down the thing that killed Jesse, two years ago, the way he’d coached her through it, told her what was going on and taught her how to banish the spirit when they found it, then put his hand on her shoulder like he was the father she’d never had, steady and strong, proud of her and grieving with her…For a man who’d been so good to turn into _that_ , into that monstrous incarnation of rage and fear, it was almost unbearable. She had to wrestle with him for an hour before she broke through to his human memories, turned his focus away from John Winchester and revenge, before she would let him speak through her to his wife and daughter.

 

She stays on at the Roadhouse, after, and for three nights she wakes from nightmares like clockwork, drenched in sweat and sobbing or screaming or fighting against something that isn’t there until finally she recognizes that it’s Ellen sitting on her bed, holding a cool cloth against her forehead and speaking to her, trying to wake her and then trying to soothe her.

 

“Why’d you call me?” Pamela asks a week later, drinking whiskey with breakfast and watching Ellen sharpen her knives. “For help, I mean. Why me?”

 

Ellen doesn’t lift her eyes from the switchblade in her hands. “Cuz I figured you’d come,” she says finally, a bland answer that raises Pamela’s hackles.

 

“No, really, Ellen, why me? I ain’t got the training for this, not the experience either. So tell me, why me?”

 

Ellen purses her lips and puts down the knife, leans on her elbows then reaches over to take away Pamela’s whiskey. “You won’t like it.”

 

“Won’t know that until you tell me.”

 

Ellen drums her fingers against the polished bar. “You’re a real powerful psychic, kid. A natural. Maybe even a seer. You got the kind of talent no one can learn and no one can take away, but it was selfish of me to call you when you were doing so good and staying out of trouble. I know that, I knew it when I called you. But it’s like this. You’re the only person I know of, or Bobby knows of, who had a chance at actually talking to Bill, not just shoving him out the door and who knows where he ends up. And I just couldn’t do that to him. Not after everything he did for so many other families.”

 

“Ellen, you know I’d do anything for your family, after what you did for me. So try again. I’m not supposed to like this…why?”

 

Ellen finally meets her eyes, and Pamela feels her heart flip over as something like pity flickers across Ellen’s face. “No part-time palm reader should have been able to contact that spirit. The one that killed your Jesse. Now I don’t know much about all this but I told Singer what you told me two years ago and he said it sounds like you called to her, that spirit. Not just that, that you summoned her, you—“

 

“Conjured her?” Pamela asks, rocking back on her stool, sweat prickling down her spine. She can’t swallow, can barely breathe. “You mean, I— when I did that _séance_ , for the murdered girl, she wasn’t just hanging around waiting to attack someone, she’d actually moved on and I…I called her back?”

 

Ellen reaches for her but Pamela pulls back, horrified, and Ellen says softly, “You live where the veil is thin, Pammy, that’s what I mean. You live where you can’t help but see both sides and there’s nothing you can do about it. Run and hide and ride that crazy bike of yours all over the country, but this ain’t going away. Spirits talk to you and they listen when you talk back. And what you did…what you did for Bill, that’s a real gift, honey—"

 

“You only call it a _gift_ because I put Bill to rest. You’re saying I got Jesse killed, that is _not_ a gift!” She barely manages to grab her keys and her jacket before she hits the door, already running.

 

***

 

Pammy returns to the Roadhouse six months later. She’s grimy from the road but looks clean under the layer of dust. She looks good, like she’s been taking care of herself, her dark hair sleek and shiny and her cheeks glowing, and she smiles when Joanna barrels into her for a hug. She smiles and it reaches all the way to her eyes. _When she smiles_ , Ellen thinks, _you’d almost believe she isn’t even twenty-three_.

 

“So what you were saying,” Pammy says later as the bar empties out, “is that I’m a damn good psychic. That what I need to do is figure out how all this works. Get trained up and make something good come of it.”

 

Ellen lifts and eyebrow and hands her another beer. “That was the general idea, yeah.”

 

Pamela shakes her head and lifts her bottle. “You could’ve just said that.”

 

“I was getting there.” Ellen gives her a wry smile and they clink their beers together. “I’m real glad you came back, Pammy.”

 

Pamela accepts her offer to help with much less fuss than Ellen expected.

 

She travels around the country for awhile, making her way through Ellen’s address book and meeting up with a half-dozen psychics and seers, and while Ellen wonders why she doesn’t include her own family on the tour, she doesn’t ask.

 

She buys a modest house after that and Ellen lends her the down payment. It’s a straight shot down I-80 from the Roadhouse and right at the crossroads of what Bobby calls the Hunter’s Highways where she’s sure to have plenty of traffic. It’s a good-sized town and a decent bar hires her on right away so she doesn’t have to live by her Ouija boards alone right off the bat. Ellen puts the word out through the usual suspects that she’s open for business, and their friends start supplying her with work. She gets a healthy mix of the real stuff alongside civilians looking for a bit of comfort or excitement, and when the real stuff gets heavy she calls Bobby and he calls in the cavalry. It works.

 

Ellen doesn’t get away from the Roadhouse much until Ash and Jo get old enough to watch the place for a few hours by themselves, but Pamela drops in on them every month or so. She gives Jo a palm reading for her thirteenth birthday and for years afterwards no one is as cool as Pammy. When Jo’s maybe fifteen, Ellen gets up in the middle of the night, sure she hears something, and down in the bar there’s Pammy and Jo, duking it out over the pinball machine.

 

A couple years later she overhears them again, their heads together at a corner of the bar. Jo’s supposed to be waiting tables but it’s a slow night.

 

“How did you know Jesse was the one?”

 

Pamela, to Ellen’s surprise, doesn’t laugh her off or roll her eyes. She reaches for Jo’s hand, saying softly, “Jo-baby…I didn’t. I still don’t.”

 

Jo frowns. “But…you never got married, or anything.”

 

Pamela does laugh at that. “Hell, Jo, I hardly have time for all my beaus, can you imagine if I added a wife or a husband into the mix?”

 

Jo swats at her shoulder and goes back to work, giggling.

 

“Can I tell you something, though,” Pamela says later, and Ellen turns away from the bar, rifling through the files by the register as she eavesdrops. “The guy who’s ‘the one’ for you when you’re seventeen? He probably won’t be ‘the one’ when you’re twenty-five. I’m not preaching that you gotta wait for some kinda enlightenment 'fore you fall in love, what I’m saying is even though you don’t feel it, you’re so young, baby. You still got lots of growing up and changing to do. And I’m not saying you don’t know your own mind right now, either – what I mean is that your mind’s still growing. It’s gonna change, that’s just a plain fact.”

 

Ellen glances over to them, sees Jo worrying the strings of her apron. “Do you think you would have changed your mind about Jesse?”

 

Pamela considers for a long moment, then gives a rueful smile and nods. Ellen feels the breath knocked out of her at that easy expression of acceptance on Pammy’s face in place of her usual teasing smirk.

 

Jo’s looking at Pamela with her head cocked to one side, chewing thoughtfully at the inside of her cheek before she nods, too. “Bet your mom would have said, ‘I told you so’.”

 

“Oh,” Pamela groans, rolling her eyes, “She’d be over the moon.”

 

“Your folks didn’t like her?”

 

“Let’s say…” Pamela rolls her eyes, directing a private smile up at the ceiling. “Let’s say there were some differences of opinion.”

 

“Cuz she was a girl?”

 

Pamela blows out a breath and shrugs. “That didn’t help none, but it was more that they blamed her for stealing me away, the day I told them I didn’t wanna be a fortune-teller like them. They weren't too keen on me sayin' I wanted to be a waitress and go to rock concerts with my girl on my days off.”

 

“Your parents are psychics, too?” Jo asks, and Ellen marvels at how close Pammy has guarded some pieces of herself, even from Joanna.

 

“My mom and my grandma. And I haven’t spoken to them since I ran off with Jesse.”

 

“You haven’t talked to them for almost ten years?” Jo gapes at Pamela, then reaches out and smacks the side of her head. “Pammy! Call your mother!”

 

Ellen can’t help her loud snort of laughter, nor her unapologetic grin when both her girls turn to glare at her.

 

***

 

“Your daughter just called me,” Pamela begins without preamble.

 

“What’s wrong? Is she okay?”

 

“She’s fine. Well, she was all but in tears because the world is ending, but she’ll be all right.”

 

Ellen sucks in a breath, lets it out slowly “What’d she say?”

 

“That she hates school, she hates her roommate, she hates the dorm food, she hates her classes, she hates being away from home…in fact she went on for a good five minutes before she got to a sentence without the word ‘hate’ in it. What’s she doing there, Ellen? She seems to think she’s being forced into this.”

 

“She is,” Ellen says. “It’s what me and Bill wanted for her. A good life, a safe life.”

 

Pamela snorts. “Obviously that’s not too high on her list of priorities right now.”

 

“Well, ain’t that what a mother’s for, to tell her kid when her priorities suck? She’ll thank me later, when she doesn’t spend her whole life with a shotgun in her hands. She’s better’n that.”

 

Pamela pauses in the act of setting out crystals for the _séance_ in an hour. “Do you think I’m suffering for doing what I do and not going to college?”

 

“My daughter is not a psychic, Pammy. She ain’t gonna be a hunter, either.”

 

“Why not?”

 

Ellen scoffs, but Pamela presses, “It’s a serious question, Ellen. Why not?”

 

“You know why the hell not.”

 

“Because of Bill.”

 

“Because I’m not going to see her die all alone in a ditch somewhere never even gettin’ thanked by whoever she’s tryin’ to save, that’s why.”

 

Pamela stays quiet for a minute, weighing her words. “Best thing I’ve learned, these last eight years, is how to live without being haunted by what I’ve lost. I know you see things different when it comes to your daughter, but where would I be if I’d let being afraid of what _might_ happen keep me from going forward? I got a good life, Ellen. A good, full life, and I owe a fair bit of that to you pulling my head out of my ass when I was barely older than Jo is now.”

 

“I appreciate what you’re saying,” Ellen says after a long pause, “but it just ain’t the same.”

 

Pamela nods, staring at her muted reflection in her framed Sex Pistols poster, and thinks she’s about due to call her own mom, see what the old bat’s getting up to this week. “All right. Just, go easy on her, okay? She’s spinning stories in her head where you’re the enemy and I know how that goes. I spent a decade not talking to my mother and I’d hate to see you and Jo go that way.”

 

***

 

“I met the junior Winchesters today.”

 

“Those boys Bobby used to talk about?”

 

“The same. They’re out working a job I had earmarked for Cody.”

 

“Just met ‘em and you’re putting ‘em to work already? I like your style, Ellen.”

 

“You know how I do, I got a business to run same as everybody else.” Ellen pauses, switching the phone to her other ear and looking out the window to where she’d watched them roll away in a big old van not an hour ago. “Damn but they grew up tall.”

 

She can hear the smirk in Pamela’s voice when she says, “Handsome like their daddy, too, I bet. Jo have a favorite, yet?”

 

“You bet your ass she does, and I’ll be keeping a shotgun aimed at his heart.”

 

Pamela laughs, and Ellen starts to relax for the first time since those boys stepped through her door.

 

“What did they want? Don’t tell me they just dropped by for a job.”

 

“They tracked me down off a message I left John a few months back.” She leans against the bar and looks up at the clock, almost time to open up for the night. “Turns out there’s a reason he never called me back.”

 

“Oh.” Pamela’s quiet for a minute, then gives a soft sigh. “How?”

 

“Demon, I guess. Same one he was after, his boys think.”

 

“And you never talked to him again, after…?”

 

Ellen shakes her head, then clears her throat. “No.”

 

“How’s that sitting with you?”

 

The last time she’d seen John Winchester had been right here, eight maybe nine months back. He’d just sent his eldest down to New Orleans which Ellen thought was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard, considering the news still pouring out of the hurricane-wrecked city, and she’d told him so. The screaming fight they’d got into had been heard across state lines, she was pretty sure, as John did more than imply that she’d forgotten about Bill, didn’t love him as much as John loved Mary, and she shot back the accusation that he didn’t give two shits for anyone’s life but the woman who’d been dead more’n two decades. She called him a murderer for what had happened to Bill, said it’d be his own fault if his son went the same way. He’d looked to be on point of pulling a gun on her when Caleb stepped in and broke them apart. John had left without a backwards glance, not waiting for the news she’d called him in for, trampling their first attempt at reconciliation into the dust.

 

“It is what it is,” Ellen says briskly, reaching for a bar rag and polishing a few glasses with the phone clamped against her shoulder. “Stubborn son of a bitch would never listen to an apology. Or give one that was due, for that matter.” She hangs the glasses on the rack and closes her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Glad his boys are all right, though. They’re beat to hell and back but they’re breathing.”

 

“Is it true, what people say about them?”

 

Ellen snorts. “Which part?”

 

“That they’re hung like horses,” Pamela deadpans. “That they’re the best couple of hunters in the lower forty-eight, what’d you think I meant?”

 

Ellen lets out a long breath, considering. “Not sure I’d say they’re the _greatest_ hunters I’ve ever seen, but they sure got something going for ‘em. It’s just that, well, they’re carrying around an awful lot of weight on their shoulders.”

 

“Well, I only met their old man the once, but that doesn’t surprise me.” There’s a short silence before she asks, “So they’re real lookers, huh?”

 

“Pammy…”

 

“Okay, okay.” Pamela’s laughing softly. “I’ll just have to ask Jo.”

 

“You will not ask Jo about any of this.”

 

“Who won’t ask me about what?”

 

Ellen brings the phone down to her shoulder, turning to face her daughter’s wide-eyed, innocent face. The one she’s been perfecting since she was six years old and oh, yes, Ellen knows this look. “I gotta go,” she says, hanging up on Pamela.

 

“Who was that?”

 

“Pamela,” Ellen answers warily.

 

“Ah.” Jo smiles, moving behind the bar to tie on her apron. “Asking about Dean and Sam.”

 

“No.”

 

Jo cocks her head and grins. “Mother, you are a terrible liar.”

 

“And you are my own personal heart attack waiting to happen. Go open up and put out the signs.”

 

Later, between beating poor schmucks at poker or pinball or whatever her game is this week, Jo says thoughtfully, “You know, I think Pamela would really go for Sam.”

 

Privately, Ellen’s pretty sure Jo just wants to keep Dean for her very own, but since that’s about as likely to happen as Dean going after Ellen herself – she’d seen the look of terror he’d directed at her – she only says, “Poor Ash.”

 

Ten years and ten times as many gentle ‘no’s from Pammy hadn’t been enough to cure him of his puppy love, and Jo snorts loudly. She might defend Ash to strangers, but there’s no shifting the fact that he’s her incredibly nerdy embarrassment of an adopted brother.

 

“Yeah,” Jo says, whipping a beer nut across the room and hitting him square on the ear, grinning when he jumps and yelps like a kicked puppy. “Cuz that was _ever_ gonna happen.”

 

“Pammy and Sam, huh?” Ellen says later, and starts to laugh. “Lord, child, she would eat him alive.”

 

Jo smiles, then grins, then can’t help laughing, too. “Yeah, you’re right. It’d be fun to watch, though.”

 

***

 

“You okay, sweetheart?”

 

Pamela looks up, and she’s twenty again, she can feel it in her bones. Twenty and looking up at Ellen who’s just as tough and beautiful as she was that day Pammy stumbled into the Roadhouse. The real one, the one downstairs. The first thing Ash did once they sent the Winchester boys on their way was comb through heaven to find Ellen and Jo and bring them here.

 

“It’s on the house,” Ellen says, sliding a tumbler of whiskey across the bar.

 

Pamela toasts the glass, downs it in one gulp and shakes her head. “Damn, that’s good. Ash, your heaven _rocks._ ”

 

At the far end of the room, Ash throws up the horns without turning around, calling out “You’re welcome!” before Jo promptly destroys him in the two seconds he took his hand off the controller. The cheery _game over!_ music sets the tempo for Jo’s heady laughter while Ash swears a blue streak.

 

“Good to see the kids back together,” Pamela says, smiling faintly. The day Jo showed up on her doorstep sobbing about the Roadhouse and a fire and that Ash was gone, was dead, had been a preview for what Pamela always halfway assumed would be her due once the curtains fell. Hell was never getting to say goodbye, she had long since decided. Hell was being helpless while your loved ones grieved.

 

But she’d gone the other way after all, and the thing about Heaven is that once you get there, it’s easy to go along with it, thinking all you had to do was show up. That this little slice of paradise is all yours, always has been; it was all meant to be.

 

Pamela’s life had been full of people coming to her for help. Looking to her for this or for that, for help or for answers. The big word, though, what everyone was always so desperate for, was guidance. Someone to show them the way, to illuminate the path under their feet when they couldn’t see it for themselves. You live your life talkin’ and walkin’ that way, it gets hard to see life -- or death -- in any other terms. Hard to imagine that it maybe wasn’t as simple as a beginning, a middle and an end; nothing so straightforward as a journey with a destination that was always gonna be your last stop.

 

The other thing about Heaven is, once you start to see the back end of things, the circuit board as Ash calls it, you start to realize that it’s not just a show you always held tickets to. The song does not remain the same, once you know you’re the one writing it.

 

“You sure you’re all right, Pammy?”

 

Pamela looks down at her hands, smooth and unlined, bitten nails with chipped polish, and tries to remember what _all right_ feels like. Tries to remember how it feels to be _Pammy_.

 

“You know,” she says, “when I got here, I woke up stretched out in this field. The grass was soft and smelled so good, like the way you imagine lying in the grass is gonna feel until you actually do it and there’s bugs and stones and you start sneezing from all the pollen, you know? I woke up and I heard music and saw lights, and I followed them and then I was just…at this show. The most amazing music and this big crowd with so much energy and life. Everyone was so happy and I was just dancing and…it never occurred to me to leave.”

 

A lot of things hadn’t occurred to her, like why she could suddenly _see_ , or why the hell she wasn’t too worried over the mess she’d left behind.

 

Pamela rolls her glass against the bar, chewing her lip. “Turns out my heaven is a place I went to once when I was sixteen and always dreamed about getting back to.”

 

“’Til Ash found you,” Ellen prompts, when Pamela falls silent.

 

“Yeah.” Pamela nods, glancing over her shoulder, nodding to the entrance. “I walked through that door and I was older, I could feel it. Older’n I ever was when Ash knew me. It confused me, changing like that.”

 

“Self-defense, maybe?” Ellen says with a slight smile, glancing over at Ash. “Still keeping yourself out of his league?”

 

Pamela shrugs, trying to smile. When Ash found her she’d started to realize that Heaven wasn’t so…unchanging…as she’d thought. She’d been reminded of the arcade games Jo played when she was a kid, the kind where the little avatar stays fixed at the center of the screen, the world shifting around it as it jumps and ducks and karate-chops. But even after Ash showed her the circuit board, every time she went to visit him she’d go home to her own heaven and fit herself right back in, singing along to every song, making herself loud even when she didn’t know the words. But after Ash found the Winchesters, the tune began to change.

 

“You know, about Heaven,” she says slowly, picking at her thumbnail. “It’s like, once you realize you’re controlling it, it stops being easy. Before, when it was just this like…feedback loop from my subconscious to the world around me, I didn’t question it. It feels like when I was trying to learn how to play guitar. Once I realized how goddamn complicated it was, I couldn’t just _listen_ to music anymore.” Pamela shakes her head and looks away, her throat suddenly tight. “Dean was right. This place is the Matrix.”

 

And just thinking the words, _Dean Winchester was right_ , had been hard enough; saying them out loud makes her gorge rise, makes her look down at herself without any surprise at all to see she’s shifted again, to feel the weariness sink back into her bones. She’d been happy, dammit. She’d been content. She’d forgotten that she knew what it felt like, _smelled_ like, to have her eyes burned out of her skull. She’d forgotten the sound of lies, the taste of betrayal, and the special brand of despair that comes from dying in vain. She’d been happy to forget. She’d been content with her heaven.

 

“Hey,” Ellen says, leaning down with her elbows on the bar, just like she used to. She’s bright-eyed, younger maybe than Pamela has ever seen her, and her grip on Pamela’s hand is firm. “Listen a minute.”

 

Ellen squeezes her then lets go, bracing her hands against the bar rail and looking over Pamela’s shoulder. Behind her, Jo and Ash and their game are background music as familiar as a heartbeat, and the way the light filters in, soft but insistent, through the grimy windows is like silent accompaniment. Pamela feels like she’s listening with her whole body and is still surprised when Ellen speaks.

 

“I’ve been fighting my whole life. And I figure, fighting is what the world is for, for those still living who got something yet to fight for. Sam and Dean, and the rest of our friends, they’re gonna see this thing through to the end and if I was still down there, hell yeah I’d still be fightin’ tooth and nail to keep things right side up. But Pammy…”

 

Ellen shakes her head and refocuses on Pamela. “I buried my husband. I buried Ash. I had to bury you, Pammy. I raised my daughter alone just to hold her in my arms as she died. So I’m done. I’m _tired_. And this place? Seems to me this place is where we get to rest. And I am so damn tired I figure it might take the rest of eternity for me to catch up on the sleep I’ve lost. I’m ready to rest, Pamela. I think we’re owed that much.”

 

Pamela blinks quickly, draws in a deep breath and is flooded with the smell of stale beer and spilled booze, salt and sweat and chalk dust, and she smiles as she feels a weight begin to lift away from her. All through her life she’d tried to travel light, never thought of herself as one to carry around an unnecessary load. As it turns out, though, even little things can be heavy. Maybe the thing about Heaven is that it’s a place you can start putting them down. She doesn’t really know, isn’t really one for metaphors, but as she sits up straight and shakes her hair back over her shoulders, she looks up at her old friend and knows one thing for damn sure.

 

“I’m so glad I met you, Ellen.”

 

“Me too, sweetheart,” Ellen says, pressing her lips to Pamela’s forehead. “Me too.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Evandar: All of your prompts were AWESOME and had me wishing I was more than passingly familiar with any of the other fandoms. Thanks for this prompt, though, it was a great challenge and I hope that you enjoy the result!
> 
> Written for this mashed-up prompt: I'd love some gen fic for these guys [...] exploring how interacting with the supernatural/Winchesters changes them. [...] How does Pamela set herself up as a psychic?
> 
> Title is a lyric from the song "Girl in the War" which I found because of [this amazing Jo & Ellen fanvid](http://swannee.dreamwidth.org/108091.html#cutid1) by colls. It was my soundtrack while writing this, please please go check out the vid and leave lots of awesome comments :]
> 
> And finally, so much gratitude goes out to frozen_delight for patiently helping shape this from a pile of ideas into something resembling an actual story, and to stardust_made for giving the final draft a good polish. Love you both.


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